During the past decade there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it has come a vast amount of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics.
Table of contents:
Overview of Supervised Learning.- Linear Methods for Regression.- Linear Methods for Classification.- Basic Expansions and Regularization.- Kernel Methods.- Model Assessment and Selection.- Model Inference and Averaging.- Additive Models, Trees, and Related Methods.- Boosting and Additive Trees.- Neural Networks.- Support Vector Machines and Flexible Discriminates.- Prototype Methods and Nearest Neighbors.- Unsupervised Learning.
Table of contents:
Overview of Supervised Learning.- Linear Methods for Regression.- Linear Methods for Classification.- Basic Expansions and Regularization.- Kernel Methods.- Model Assessment and Selection.- Model Inference and Averaging.- Additive Models, Trees, and Related Methods.- Boosting and Additive Trees.- Neural Networks.- Support Vector Machines and Flexible Discriminates.- Prototype Methods and Nearest Neighbors.- Unsupervised Learning.
From the reviews: SIAM REVIEW "The book is very well written and color is used throughout. Color adds a dimension that can be used to help the reader visualize high-dimensional data, and it is also very useful to help the eye see patterns and clusters more easily. This makes color effective in the book and not just a pleasing gimmick. This is the first book of its kind to treat data mining from a statistical perspective that is comprehensive and up-to-date on the statistical methods...I found the book to be both innovative and fresh. It provides an important contribution to data mining and statistical pattern recognition. It should become a classic...It is especially good for statisticians interested in high-dimensional and high-volume data such as can be found in telephone records, satellite images, and genetic microarrays. It can be used for an advanced special topics course in statistics for graduate students." TECHNOMETRICS "[This] is a vast and complex book. Generally, it concentrates on explaining why and how the methods work, rather than how to use them. Examples and especially the visualizations are principle features...As a source for the methods of statistical learning...it will probably be a long time before there is a competitor to this book." SHORT BOOK REVIEWS "This book describes modern tools for data analysis. With the exception of the last chapter, it is concerned with "supervised" methods - those methods in which a sample of cases is available, including values of an outcome variable, and on which one can build a model allowing one to predict the value of the outcome variable for new cases. The authors are amongst the leaders in this area, having developed many of the modern tools. Such methods have seen extraordinary development in recent decades, primarily because of progress in computer technology, but also because of the huge range of applications. Furthermore, the practical development of the.